Medication adherence, including patient adherence to medication regimens is an important aspect of any system providing medical services. Specifically, lack of medical adherence has a negative effect on outcomes and increases costs associated with providing medical services. For example, research shows that:                1. Approximately 25% of patients prescribed medications for a new illness fail to fill their initial prescription;        2. Approximately half of patients taking maintenance medications for a chronic disease stop taking their medications within the first year; and,        3. The estimated cost of unnecessary medical treatment attributable to medication non-adherence is $290B annually.        
Several solutions have been proposed to address the problem of medical adherence with respect to medication regimens. One solution path is to provide more coordinated delivery of medications to the patient, especially since many people have prescriptions for multiple medications, each requiring different dosage regimens. For example, it is known for a pharmacy to deliver multiple medications by mail in blister-pack format. Each blister in the package contains all medications to be taken at one time. There may be two to four blisters per day. Each package will typically contain a week's worth of a patient's medications. The patient is required to burst the appropriate blister at the appropriate time, remove the pills, and take them. However, there are known problems with this approach. For example, the medication administration is ‘open loop’, that is, there is no way for a health care provider, pharmacy, or other interested party to determine of if the pills were removed from a blister at the appropriate time and taken by the patient at the appropriate time. The blister pack must be amenable to handling and shipping, for example, relatively inexpensive, light weight, and easy filled. However, such a configuration may not be an optimal configuration for a patient to use.
It is also is known to use home-based medication dispensers. For example, the patient or a designated caregiver is required to periodically pre-load the appropriate pills into provided cups, according to each pill's dosage regimen. The pre-loaded cups are then placed into the dispenser. The dispenser then releases each cup's contents at a designated time. The dispenser, being an active device, can alert the patient via audible alarm that medication is due to be taken. The dispenser can also communicate via telephone line with a remote caregiver or monitoring service. However, there are problems with the dispensers. The patient and/or caregiver must be responsible to fulfill multiple prescriptions, which may be out of synch with each other. Any pill packing errors by the patient or caregiver will not be detected by the dispenser. Any potential medication interactions will not be flagged since different prescriptions are not coordinated.